Sports wagering is an activity enjoyed by many and typically involves placing wagers on the outcome of one or more events, including but not limited to the final outcome of a subject match. In the United States, it is illegal for individuals or enterprises to engage in the business of assisting or facilitating the placing of such wagers over “wire communication facilities”. Laws in this area have been generally interpreted as forbidding the use of Internet web sites (based in, or perhaps even accessible to persons residing in, the United States) for the purposes of sports betting.
There exist many different forms of bracket pools, each offering participants different ways to win. The most popular pool involves participants filling out brackets by trying to pick winners of different games at each stage of tournament play. Entry fees for such pools may vary from a few dollars to hundreds or even thousands of dollars, depending on the enterprise running the pool. The winner is generally the participant that picks the most correct winners, with final game score predictions often being used as tiebreakers. In one common variation of this pool, the points per win vary as the tournament progresses through different rounds.
In addition to the simple bracket pool other popular forms of tournament wagering schemes include bidding pools, where teams are auctioned off and awarded to the highest bidder, with the “owner” of the ultimate winning team them collecting all of the pool receipts. Lottery pools are sometimes used at intermediate rounds of the National College Athletics Association's (NCAA) Division I men's basketball tournament and involve participants drawing for lots then selecting teams in order of their lot values. This well-known sporting event (which culminates each year in the “Final Four” teams facing off against one another in a pair of national semi-final games and one national final game) is among the most watched and most heavily wagered upon event of its kind. Each March (during the NCAA tournament), office bracket pools are commonplace and it has been estimated that the $100 Million or so that is earned by licensed casinos through wagers on the tournament games represents only a small fraction of the total amount of money spent by Americans on such activities.
Box pools, which are used with virtually all spots in wagering schemes, involve assigning participants to boxes on a grid (the two axes of the grid representing the two competing teams in a game) and then populating the grid with numbers (usually ranging from 0-9). The numbers represent the teams' respective scores (usually just the last number of the respective scores for a basketball game) and the winner is the participant that “owns” the box representing the final score (or a score at half-time, etc.).
A common feature of all of the above-described pools is that participants wager on the outcome. That is, participants agree to pay a certain amount of money (usually collected by the pool organizer as a condition for entry into the pool) for the privilege of being allowed to participate in the pool, with the hope of winning a prize depending on the outcome of the underlying game or set of games. As such, these pools would all be illegal in the United States if conducted over the Internet.